Sino-Tibetan languages

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Sino-Tibetan
Trans-Himalayan
Geographic East Asia, South Asia, Southeast
distribution Asia
Linguistic One of the world's primary
classification language families
Proto-language Proto-Sino-Tibetan
Some 40 well-established
subgroups, of which those with
the most speakers are:

 Sinitic (Chinese)
 Lolo-Burmese
 Tibetic
Subdivisions  Karenic
 Bodo–Garo
 Kuki-Chin
 Meitei
 Tamangic
 Bai
 Jingpho–Luish

ISO 639-2 / 5 sit

Linguasphere 79- (phylozone)
Glottolog sino1245

Groupings of Sino-Tibetan Languages

Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources,[1][2] is a family of
more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native
speakers.[3] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese
languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include
Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the
family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge
of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote
mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a

proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level
structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally
presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a
common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. Although
Chinese linguists generally include Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages within
Sino-Tibetan, most other linguists have excluded them since the 1940s. Several links
to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.

Contents
 1 History
o 1.1 Early work
o 1.2 Shafer and Benedict
o 1.3 Study of literary languages
o 1.4 Fieldwork
 2 Distribution
o 2.1 Contemporary languages
o 2.2 Homeland
 3 Classification
o 3.1 Li (1937)
o 3.2 Benedict (1942)
o 3.3 Shafer (1955)
o 3.4 Matisoff (1978, 2015)
o 3.5 Starostin (1996)
o 3.6 Van Driem (1997, 2001)
o 3.7 Van Driem (2001, 2014)
o 3.8 Blench and Post (2014)
o 3.9 Menghan Zhang, Shi Yan, et al. (2019)
 4 Typology
o 4.1 Word order
o 4.2 Morphology
 5 Vocabulary
 6 External classification
 7 Notes
 8 References
o 8.1 Citations
o 8.2 Works cited
 o 8.3 General
 9 External links

History
A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and other languages was
first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted. The initial focus
on languages of civilizations with long literary traditions has been broadened to
include less widely spoken languages, some of which have only recently, or never,
been written. However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than
for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. Difficulties have included the
great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects
of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in
mountainous areas that are difficult to access, and are often also sensitive border
zones.[4]

Early work

During the 18th century, several scholars had noticed parallels between Tibetan and
Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following
century, Brian Houghton Hodgson and others noted that many non-literary languages
of the highlands of northeast India and Southeast Asia were also related to these. The
name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson
Logan, who added Karen in 1858.[5][6] The third volume of the Linguistic Survey of
India, edited by Sten Konow, was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British
India.[7]

Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century
by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai,
Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that
Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary but that Thai,
Mon, and Vietnamese were quite different.[8][9] Ernst Kuhn envisaged a group with
two branches, Chinese-Siamese and Tibeto-Burman.[a] August Conrady called this
group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about
Karen. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding
his exclusion of Vietnamese. Franz Nikolaus Finck in 1909 placed Karen as a third
branch of Chinese-Siamese.[10][11]

Jean Przyluski introduced the French term sino-tibétain as the title of his chapter on
the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les langues du monde in 1924.[12][13] He divided
them into three groups: Tibeto-Burman, Chinese and Tai,[12] and was uncertain about
the affinity of Karen and Hmong–Mien.[14] The English translation "Sino-Tibetan"
first appeared in a short note by Przyluski and Luce in 1931.[15]

Shafer and Benedict

In 1935, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber started the Sino-Tibetan Philology Project,
funded by the Works Project Administration and based at the University of California,
Berkeley. The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by
Paul K. Benedict. Under their direction, the staff of 30 non-linguists collated all the
available documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. The result was eight copies of a
15-volume typescript entitled Sino-Tibetan Linguistics.[7][b] This work was never
published, but furnished the data for a series of papers by Shafer, as well as Shafer's
five-volume Introduction to Sino-Tibetan and Benedict's Sino-Tibetan, a Conspectus.
[17]

Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until
1972.[18] Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-
Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional
comparisons with other languages.[19] He reconstructed a two-way distinction on
initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial
consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages.[20] Thus,
Benedict reconstructed the following initials:[21]

TB Tibetan Jingpho Burmese Garo Mizo S'gaw Karen Old Chinese[c]

*k k(h) k(h) ~ g k(h) k(h) ~ g k(h) k(h) *k(h)
*g g g ~ k(h) k g ~ k(h) k k(h) *gh
*ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ ŋ y *ŋ
*t t(h) t(h) ~ d t(h) t(h) ~ d t(h) t(h) *t(h)
*d d d ~ t(h) t d ~ t(h) d d *dh
*n n n n n n n *n ~ *ń
*p p(h) p(h) ~ b p(h) p(h) ~ b p(h) p(h) *p(h)
*b b b ~ p(h) p b ~ p(h) b b *bh
*m m m m m m m *m
*ts ts(h) ts ~ dz ts(h) s ~ tś(h) s s(h) *ts(h)
*dz dz dz ~ ts ~ ś ts tś(h) f s(h) ?
*s s s s th th θ *s
*z z z~ś s s f θ ?
*r r r r r r γ *l
*l l l l l l l *l
*h h ∅ h ∅ h h *x
*w ∅ w w w w w *gjw
*y y y y tś ~ dź z y *dj ~ *zj

Although the initial consonants of cognates tend to have the same place and manner
of articulation, voicing and aspiration is often unpredictable.[22] This irregularity was
attacked by Roy Andrew Miller,[23] though Benedict's supporters attribute it to the
effects of prefixes that have been lost and are often unrecoverable.[24] The issue
remains unsolved today.[22] It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable
shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been
borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman, by Christopher Beckwith, one of the few
scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman.[25][26]

Benedict also reconstructed, at least for Tibeto-Burman, prefixes such as the causative
s-, the intransitive m-, and r-, b- g- and d- of uncertain function, as well as suffixes -s,
-t and -n.[27]
Study of literary languages

Ancient Chinese text on bamboo strips

Old Chinese is by far the oldest recorded Sino-Tibetan language, with inscriptions
dating from around 1250 BC and a huge body of literature from the first millennium
BC, but the Chinese script is not alphabetic. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the
phonology of Old Chinese by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of
Middle Chinese in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in Chinese characters
and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. The first complete reconstruction, the
Grammata Serica Recensa of Bernard Karlgren, was used by Benedict and Shafer.[28]

Karlgren's reconstruction was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds having a highly
non-uniform distribution. Later scholars have revised it by drawing on a range of
other sources.[29] Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan
languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them.[30] For
example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to
a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman.[31] Similarly, Karlgren's
*l has been recast as *r, with a different initial interpreted as *l, matching Tibeto-
Burman cognates, but also supported by Chinese transcriptions of foreign names.[32] A
growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones, and that the
tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. One of these, *-s, is
believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages.[33]

Old Tibetan text found at Turfan

Tibetic has extensive written records from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan
Empire in the mid-7th century. The earliest records of Burmese (such as the 12th-
century Myazedi inscription) are more limited, but later an extensive literature
developed. Both languages are recorded in alphabetic scripts ultimately derived from
the Brahmi script of Ancient India. Most comparative work has used the conservative
written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and
Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods.[34]

There are also extensive records in Tangut, the language of the Western Xia (1038–
1227). Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose
interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have
been found.[35][36]

Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese and Tangut in an
effort to establish sound correspondences between those languages.[19][37] He found
that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə.[38]
While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto-Burman subgroup, Hill
(2014) finds that Burmese has distinct correspondences for Old Chinese rhymes -ay :
*-aj and -i : *-əj, and hence argues that the development *ə > *a occurred
independently in Tibetan and Burmese.[39]

Fieldwork

The descriptions of non-literary languages used by Shafer and Benedict were often
produced by missionaries and colonial administrators of varying linguistic skill.[40][41]
Most of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in inaccessible mountainous
areas, many of which are politically or militarily sensitive and thus closed to
investigators. Until the 1980s, the best-studied areas were Nepal and northern
Thailand.[42] In the 1980s and 1990s, new surveys were published from the Himalayas
and southwestern China. Of particular interest was the discovery of a new branch of
the family, the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.[43][44]

Distribution
Distribution of the larger branches of Sino-Tibetan, with proportion of first-language
speakers:[45]
  Chinese (94.3%)   Karenic (0.3%)
  Lolo–Burmese (3.4%)   others (1.6%)
  Tibetic (0.4%)

Most of the current spread of Sino-Tibetan languages is the result of historical

expansions of the three groups with the most speakers – Chinese, Burmese and
Tibetic – replacing an unknown number of earlier languages. These groups also have
the longest literary traditions of the family. The remaining languages are spoken in
mountainous areas, along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian
Massif and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Contemporary languages

The branch with the largest number of speakers by far is the Sinitic languages, with
1.3 billion speakers, most of whom live in the eastern half of China.[46] The first
records of Chinese are oracle bone inscriptions from c. 1250 BC, when Old Chinese
was spoken around the middle reaches of the Yellow River.[47] Chinese has since
expanded throughout China, forming a family whose diversity has been compared
with the Romance languages. Diversity is greater in the rugged terrain of southeast
China than in the North China Plain.[48]

Burmese is the national language of Myanmar, and the first language of some 33
million people.[49] Burmese speakers first entered the northern Irrawaddy basin from
what is now western Yunnan in the early ninth century, in conjunction with an
invasion by Nanzhao that shattered the Pyu city-states.[50] Other Burmish languages
are still spoken in Dehong Prefecture in the far west of Yunnan.[51] By the 11th
century, their Pagan Kingdom had expanded over the whole basin.[50] The oldest texts,
such as the Myazedi inscription, date from the early 12th century.[51] The closely
related Loloish languages are spoken by 9 million people in the mountains of western
Sichuan, Yunnan and nearby areas in northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and
Vietnam.[52][45]

The Tibetic languages are spoken by some 6 million people on the Tibetan Plateau
and neighbouring areas in the Himalayas and western Sichuan.[53] They are descended
from Old Tibetan, which was originally spoken in the Yarlung Valley before it was
spread by the expansion of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century.[54] Although the
empire collapsed in the ninth century, Classical Tibetan remained influential as the
liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism.[55]

The remaining languages are spoken in upland areas. Southernmost are the Karen
languages, spoken by 4 million people in the hill country along the Myanmar–
Thailand border, with the greatest diversity in the Karen Hills, which are believed to
be the homeland of the group.[56] The highlands stretching from northeast India to
northern Myanmar contain over 100 high-diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. Other
Sino-Tibetan languages are found along the southern slopes of the Himalayas and the
eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.[57] The 22 official languages listed in the Eighth
Schedule to the Constitution of India include only two Sino-Tibetan languages,
namely Meitei (officially called Manipuri) and Bodo.

Homeland

There have been a range of proposals for the Sino-Tibetan urheimat, reflecting the
uncertainty about the classification of the family and its time depth.[58] Three major
hypotheses for the place and time of Sino-Tibetan unity have been presented:[59]

 The most commonly cited hypothesis associates the family with the Neolithic
Yangshao culture (7000–5000 years BP) of the Yellow River basin, with an
expansion driven by millet agriculture. This scenario is associated with a
proposed primary split between Sinitic in the east and the Tibeto-Burman
languages, often assigned to the Majiayao culture (5300–4000 years BP) in the
upper reaches of the Yellow River on the northeast edge of the Tibetan
plateau.[59] For example, James Matisoff proposes a split around 6000 years
BP, with Chinese-speakers settling along the Yellow River and other groups
migrating south down the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers.
[60]

 George van Driem proposes a Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Sichuan Basin

before 9000 years BP, with an associated taxonomy reflecting various outward
migrations over time, first into northeast India, and later north (the
predecessors of Chinese and Tibetic) and south (Karen and Lolo–Burmese).[61]
 Roger Blench argues that agriculture cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Sino-
Tibetan.[62] Blench and Mark Post have proposed that the earliest speakers of
Sino-Tibetan were not farmers but highly diverse foragers in the eastern
foothills of the Himalayas in Northeast India, the area of greatest diversity,
around 9000 years BP.[63] They then envisage a series of migrations over the
following millennia, with Sinitic representing one of the groups that migrated
into China.[64]
Zhang et al. (2019) performed a computational phylogenetic analysis of 109 Sino-
Tibetan languages to suggest a Sino-Tibetan homeland in northern China near the
Yellow River basin. The study further suggests that there was an initial major split
between the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages approximately 4,200 to 7,800 years
ago (with an average of 5,900 years ago), associated with the Yangshao and/or
Majiayao cultures.[59] Sagart et al. (2019) performed another phylogenetic analysis
based on different data and methods to arrive at the same conclusions with respect to
the homeland and divergence model but proposed an earlier root age of approximately
7,200 years ago, associating its origin with millet farmers of the late Cishan culture
and early Yangshao culture.[65]

Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to Sagart et al. (2019)[65]

Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to van Driem (2005)[66]

Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to Blench (2009)[67][68]

Classification
Several low-level branches of the family, particularly Lolo-Burmese, have been
securely reconstructed, but in the absence of a secure reconstruction of a Sino-Tibetan
proto-language, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.[69][70] Thus, a
conservative classification of Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman would posit several dozen
small coordinate families and isolates; attempts at subgrouping are either geographic
conveniences or hypotheses for further research.

Li (1937)

In a survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook, Li Fang-Kuei described the family as

consisting of four branches:[71][72]

Indo-Chinese (Sino-Tibetan)

 Chinese
 Tai (later expanded to Kam–Tai)
 Miao–Yao (Hmong–Mien)
 Tibeto-Burman

Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone
systems and some vocabulary with Chinese. At the time, tone was considered so
fundamental to language that tonal typology could be used as the basis for
classification. In the Western scholarly community, these languages are no longer
included in Sino-Tibetan, with the similarities attributed to diffusion across the
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, especially since Benedict (1942).[72] The
exclusions of Vietnamese by Kuhn and of Tai and Miao–Yao by Benedict were
vindicated in 1954 when André-Georges Haudricourt demonstrated that the tones of
Vietnamese were reflexes of final consonants from Proto-Mon–Khmer.[73]

Many Chinese linguists continue to follow Li's classification.[d][72] However, this

arrangement remains problematic. For example, there is disagreement over whether to
include the entire Kra–Dai family or just Kam–Tai (Zhuang–Dong excludes the Kra
languages), because the Chinese cognates that form the basis of the putative
relationship are not found in all branches of the family and have not been
reconstructed for the family as a whole. In addition, Kam–Tai itself no longer appears
to be a valid node within Kra–Dai.

Benedict (1942)

Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as Hmong–

Mien and Kra–Dai (placing them in Austro-Tai). He otherwise retained the outlines of
Conrady's Indo-Chinese classification, though putting Karen in an intermediate
position:[74][75]

Sino-Tibetan

 Chinese
 Tibeto-Karen
o Karen
o Tibeto-Burman
Shafer (1955)

Shafer criticized the division of the family into Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Daic
branches, which he attributed to the different groups of languages studied by Konow
and other scholars in British India on the one hand and by Henri Maspero and other
French linguists on the other.[76] He proposed a detailed classification, with six top-
level divisions:[77][78][e]

Sino-Tibetan

 Sinitic
 Daic
 Bodic
 Burmic
 Baric
 Karenic

Shafer was sceptical of the inclusion of Daic, but after meeting Maspero in Paris
decided to retain it pending a definitive resolution of the question.[79][80]

Matisoff (1978, 2015)

James Matisoff abandoned Benedict's Tibeto-Karen hypothesis:

Sino-Tibetan

 Chinese
 Tibeto-Burman

Some more-recent Western scholars, such as Bradley (1997) and La Polla (2003),
have retained Matisoff's two primary branches, though differing in the details of
Tibeto-Burman. However, Jacques (2006) notes, "comparative work has never been
able to put forth evidence for common innovations to all the Tibeto-Burman
languages (the Sino-Tibetan languages to the exclusion of Chinese)"[f] and that "it no
longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan
family,"[g] because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has
been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese.

The internal structure of Sino-Tibetan has been tentatively revised as the following
Stammbaum by Matisoff (2015: xxxii, 1123–1127) in the final print release of the
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT).[81][82] Matisoff (2015:
xxxi) acknowledges that the position of Chinese as either a sister branch of Tibeto-
Burman or a branch within Tibeto-Burman remains an open question.

Sino-Tibetan

 Chinese
 Tibeto-Burman
o Northeast Indian areal group
 "North Assam"
  Tani
 Deng
 Kuki-Chin
 "Naga" areal group
 Central Naga (Ao group)
 Angami–Pochuri group
 Zeme group
 Tangkhulic
 Meitei
 Mikir / Karbi
 Mru
 Sal
 Bodo–Garo
 Northern Naga / Konyakian
 Jingpho–Asakian
o Himalayish
 Tibeto-Kanauri
 Western Himalayish
 Bodic
 Lepcha
 Tamangish
 Dhimal
 Newar
 Kiranti
 Kham-Magar-Chepang
o Tangut-Qiang
 Tangut
 Qiangic
 Rgyalrongic
o Nungic
o Tujia
o Lolo-Burmese–Naxi
 Lolo-Burmese
 Naxi
o Karenic
o Bai

Starostin (1996)

Sergei Starostin proposed that both the Kiranti languages and Chinese are divergent
from a "core" Tibeto-Burman of at least Bodish, Lolo-Burmese, Tamangic, Jinghpaw,
Kukish, and Karen (other families were not analysed) in a hypothesis called Sino-
Kiranti. The proposal takes two forms: that Sinitic and Kiranti are themselves a valid
node or that the two are not demonstrably close, so that Sino-Tibetan has three
primary branches:

Sino-Tibetan (version 1)

 Sino-Kiranti
 Tibeto-Burman
 Sino-Tibetan (version 2)

 Chinese
 Kiranti
 Tibeto-Burman

Van Driem (1997, 2001)

Van Driem, like Shafer, rejects a primary split between Chinese and the rest,
suggesting that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in Sino-Tibetan to
historical, typological, and cultural, rather than linguistic, criteria. He calls the entire
family "Tibeto-Burman", a name he says has historical primacy,[83] but other linguists
who reject a privileged position for Chinese nevertheless continue to call the resulting
family "Sino-Tibetan".

Like Matisoff, van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki–Naga"
languages (Kuki, Mizo, Meitei, etc.), both amongst each other and to the other
languages of the family, remain unclear. However, rather than placing them in a
geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified. He has
proposed several hypotheses, including the reclassification of Chinese to a Sino-Bodic
subgroup:

Tibeto-Burman

 Western (Baric, Brahmaputran, or Sal): Dhimal, Bodo–Garo, Konyak,

Kachin–Luic
 Eastern
o Northern (Sino-Bodic)
 Northwestern (Bodic): Bodish, Kirantic, West
Himalayish, Tamangic and several isolates
 Northeastern (Sinitic)
o Southern
 Southwestern: Lolo-Burmese, Karenic
 Southeastern: Qiangic, Jiarongic
 a number of other small families and isolates as primary branches
(Newar, Nungish, Magaric, etc.)

Van Driem points to two main pieces of evidence establishing a special relationship
between Sinitic and Bodic and thus placing Chinese within the Tibeto-Burman family.
First, there are a number of parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and the
modern Bodic languages. Second, there is an impressive body of lexical cognates
between the Chinese and Bodic languages, represented by the Kirantic language
Limbu.[84]

In response, Matisoff notes that the existence of shared lexical material only serves to
establish an absolute relationship between two language families, not their relative
relationship to one another. Although some cognate sets presented by van Driem are
confined to Chinese and Bodic, many others are found in Sino-Tibetan languages
generally and thus do not serve as evidence for a special relationship between Chinese
and Bodic.[85]
Van Driem (2001, 2014)

George van Driem (2001) has also proposed a "fallen leaves" model that lists dozens
of well-established low-level groups while remaining agnostic about intermediate
groupings of these.[86] In the most recent version (van Driem 2014), 42 groups are
identified (with individual languages highlighted in italics):[87]

 Bodish
 Tshangla
 West Himalayish
 Tamangic
 Newaric
 Kiranti
 Lepcha
 Magaric
 Chepangic
 Raji–Raute
 Dura
 'Ole
 Gongduk
 Lhokpu
 Siangic
 Kho-Bwa
 Hrusish
 Digarish
 Midžuish
 Tani
 Dhimalish
 Brahmaputran (Sal)
 Pyu
 Ao
 Angami–Pochuri
 Tangkhul
 Zeme
 Meithei
 Kukish
 Karbi
 Mru
 Sinitic
 Bai
 Tujia
 Lolo-Burmese
 Qiangic
 Ersuish
 Naic
 Rgyalrongic
 Kachinic
 Nungish
 Karenic
van Driem (2007) also suggested that the Sino-Tibetan language family be renamed
"Trans-Himalayan", which he considers to be more neutral.[88]

Orlandi (2021) also considers the van Driem's Trans-Himalayan fallen leaves model
to be more plausible than the bifurcate classification of Sino-Tibetan being split into
Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman.[89]

Blench and Post (2014)

Roger Blench and Mark W. Post have criticized the applicability of conventional
Sino-Tibetan classification schemes to minor languages lacking an extensive written
history (unlike Chinese, Tibetic, and Burmese). They find that the evidence for the
subclassification or even ST affiliation at all of several minor languages of
northeastern India, in particular, is either poor or absent altogether.

While relatively little has been known about the languages of this region up to and
including the present time, this has not stopped scholars from proposing that these
languages either constitute or fall within some other Tibeto-Burman subgroup.
However, in absence of any sort of systematic comparison – whether the data are
thought reliable or not – such "subgroupings" are essentially vacuous. The use of
pseudo-genetic labels such as "Himalayish" and "Kamarupan" inevitably give an
impression of coherence which is at best misleading.

— Blench & Post (2014), p. 3

In their view, many such languages would for now be best considered unclassified, or
"internal isolates" within the family. They propose a provisional classification of the
remaining languages:

Sino-Tibetan

 Karbi (Mikir)
 Mruish
 (unnamed group)
o (unnamed group)
 Tani
 Nagish: Ao, Kuki-Chin, Tangkhul, Zeme, Angami–
Pochuri and Meitei
o (unnamed group)
 Western: Gongduk, 'Ole, Mahakiranti, Lepcha, Kham–
Magaric–Chepang, Tamangic, and Lhokpu
 Karenic
 Jingpho–Konyak–Bodo
 Eastern
 Tujia
 Bai
 Northern Qiangic
 Southern Qiangic
 (unnamed group)
 Chinese (Sinitic)
  Lolo-Burmese–Naic
 Bodish
 Nungish

Following that, because they propose that the three best-known branches may actually
be much closer related to each other than they are to "minor" Sino-Tibetan languages,
Blench and Post argue that "Sino-Tibetan" or "Tibeto-Burman" are inappropriate
names for a family whose earliest divergences led to different languages altogether.
They support the proposed name "Trans-Himalayan".

Menghan Zhang, Shi Yan, et al. (2019)

A team of researchers led by Pan Wuyun and Jin Li proposed the following
phylogenetic tree in 2019, based on lexical items:[90]

 Sinitic
 Tibeto-Burman
o (unnamed group)
 Karenic
 Kuki-Chin–Naga
o (unnamed group)
 Sal
 (unnamed group)
 (unnamed group)
 Digarish
 Tani
 (unnamed group)
 (unnamed group)
 Himalayish
 Nungish
 (unnamed group)
 Kinauri
 (unnamed group)
 (unnamed group)
 Gurung-Tamang
 Bodish
 (unnamed group)
 (unnamed group)
 Naic
 Ersuish, Qiangic,
Rgyalrongic
 Lolo-Burmese

Typology
Word order

Except for the Chinese, Bai, Karenic, and Mruic languages, the usual word order in
Sino-Tibetan languages is object–verb.[91] However, Chinese and Bai differ from
almost all other subject–verb–object languages in the world in placing relative clauses
before the nouns they modify.[92] Most scholars believe SOV to be the original order,
with Chinese, Karen and Bai having acquired SVO order due to the influence of
neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.[93][94] This has
been criticized as being insufficiently corroborated by Djamouri et al. 2007, who
instead reconstruct a VO order for Proto-Sino-Tibetan.[95]

Morphology

Sino-Tibetan is structurally one of the most diverse language families in the world,
including all of the gradation of morphological complexity from isolating (Lolo-
Burmese, Tujia) to polysynthetic (Gyalrongic, Kiranti) languages.[65] While Sinitic
languages are normally taken to be a prototypical example of the isolating
morphological type, southern Chinese languages express this trait far more strongly
than northern Chinese languages do.[96]

Hodgson had in 1849 noted a dichotomy between "pronominalized" (inflecting)

languages, stretching across the Himalayas from Himachal Pradesh to eastern Nepal,
and "non-pronominalized" (isolating) languages. Konow (1909) explained the
pronominalized languages as due to a Munda substratum, with the idea that Indo-
Chinese languages were essentially isolating as well as tonal. Maspero later attributed
the putative substratum to Indo-Aryan. It was not until Benedict that the inflectional
systems of these languages were recognized as (partially) native to the family.
Scholars disagree over the extent to which the agreement system in the various
languages can be reconstructed for the proto-language.[97][98]

In morphosyntactic alignment, many Tibeto-Burman languages have ergative and/or

anti-ergative (an argument that is not an actor) case marking. However, the anti-
ergative case markings can not be reconstructed at higher levels in the family and are
thought to be innovations.[99]

Vocabulary
See also: Old Chinese § Classification

Sino-Tibetan numerals

Old Old Old

Jingpho[1 Garo[10 Limbu[10 Kanauri[1 Tujia[10
gloss Chinese Tibetan Burmese[1
[1 [1
02] 2] 3] 04] 5]
00] 01] 01]

一 *ʔjit – ac – sa – id –

"one"
隻 *tjek
gcig tac – thik – –
"single"
"two" 二 *njijs gnyis nhac – gini nɛtchi niš ne⁵⁵

"three
三 *sum gsum sumḥ mə̀sūm gittam sumsi sum so⁵⁵
"

"four" 四 *sjijs bzhi liy mə̀lī bri lisi pə: ze⁵⁵

"five" 五 *ŋaʔ lnga ṅāḥ mə̀ŋā boŋa nasi ṅa ũ⁵⁵

六 *C-
"six" drug khrok krúʔ dok tuksi țuk wo²¹
rjuk

"seven
七 *tsʰjit – khu-nac sə̀nìt sini nusi štiš ne²¹
"

"eight
八 *pret brgyad rhac mə̀tshát chet yɛtchi rəy je²¹
"

"nine" 九 *kjuʔ dgu kuiḥ cə̀khù sku[106] sku sgui kɨe⁵⁵

十 *gjəp – kip[107] – – gip – –

"ten"
– bcu chay shī chikuŋ – səy –

External classification
Beyond the traditionally recognized families of Southeast Asia, a number of possible
broader relationships have been suggested.

The "Sino-Caucasian" hypothesis of Sergei Starostin posits that the Yeniseian

languages and North Caucasian languages form a clade with Sino-Tibetan. The Sino-
Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to "Dené–Caucasian" to include
the Na-Dené languages of North America, Burushaski, Basque and, occasionally,
Etruscan. A narrower binary Dené–Yeniseian family has recently been well received.
The validity of the rest of the family, however, is viewed as doubtful or rejected by
nearly all historical linguists.[108][109][110]

Around 1920 linguist Edward Sapir became convinced that Na–Dené was more
closely related to Sino–Tibetan than to other American families. He suggests that the
Sino-Tibetan languages are related to the Na-Dené languages.[111][112]
Geoffrey Caveney (2014) suggests that the Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene languages are
related but his analysis does not support the Sino-Caucasian or Dene-Caucasian
hypothesis.[113]

In contrast, Laurent Sagart proposes a Sino-Austronesian family with Sino-Tibetan

and Austronesian (including Kra–Dai as a subbranch) as primary branches.[114] Stanley
Starosta has extended this proposal with a further branch called "Yangzian" joining
Hmong–Mien and Austroasiatic.[115]

Gao also suggested a genetic link between the Uralic and Sinitic languages (Sino-
Uralic).[116]

August Conrad proposed the Sino-Tibetan-Indo-European language family. This

hypothesis holds that there is a genetic relationship between the Sino-Tibetan
language family and the Indo-European language family. The earliest comparative
linguistic study of Chinese and Indo-European languages was the 18th century Nordic
scholar Olaus Rudbeck. He compared the vocabulary of Gothic and Chinese and
guessed that the two may be of the same origin. In the second half of the 19th century,
Kong Haogu, Shigude, Ijosser, etc. successively proposed that Chinese and European
languages are homologous. Among them, Kong Haogu, through the comparison of
Chinese and Indo-European domestic animal vocabulary, first proposed Indo-Chinese
language macrofamily (including Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and Indo-European
languages). In the 20th century, R. Shafer put forward the conjecture of the Eurasian
super language family and listed hundreds of similar words between Tibeto-Burman
and Indo-European languages.[117][118] From the 1960s, Canadian Sinologist Edwin G.
Pulleyblank began to demonstrate the genetic relationship between Sino-Tibetan and
Indo-European languages from historical comparative linguistics, anthropology,
archaeology, etc. After the 21st century, Zhou Jixu, Gao Jingyi, etc. Chinese scholars
also provided hundreds of cognates of Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European languages.[119]
[120][121]

Notes
1.

 Kuhn (1889), p. 189: "wir das Tibetisch-Barmanische einerseits, das Chinesisch-

Siamesische anderseits als deutlich geschiedene und doch wieder verwandte Gruppen
einer einheitlichen Sprachfamilie anzuerkennen haben." (also quoted in van Driem
(2001), p. 264.)
  The volumes were: 1. Introduction and bibliography, 2. Bhotish, 3. West
Himalayish, 4. West Central Himalayish, 5. East Himalayish, 6. Digarish, 7. Nungish,
8. Dzorgaish, 9. Hruso, 10. Dhimalish, 11. Baric, 12. Burmish–Lolish, 13. Kachinish,
14. Kukish, 15. Mruish.[16]
  Karlgren's reconstruction, with aspiration as 'h' and 'i̯ ' as 'j' to aid comparison.
  See, for example, the "Sino-Tibetan" (汉藏语系 Hàn-Zàng yǔxì) entry in the
"languages" (語言文字, Yǔyán-Wénzì) volume of the Encyclopedia of China (1988).
  For Shafer, the suffix "-ic" denoted a primary division of the family, whereas
the suffix "-ish" denoted a sub-division of one of those.
  les travaux de comparatisme n'ont jamais pu mettre en évidence l'existence
d'innovations communes à toutes les langues « tibéto-birmanes » (les langues sino-
tibétaines à l'exclusion du chinois)

7.  il ne semble plus justifié de traiter le chinois comme le premier

embranchement primaire de la famille sino-tibétaine

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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sino-Tibetan languages.

 James Matisoff, "Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping"

 Sino-Tibetan Branches Project (STBP)
 Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Introductory remarks
 Sinotibetan Lexical Homology Database
 Guillaume Jacques, "The Genetic Position of Chinese"
 Marc Miyake (2014), "Why Sino-Tibetan reconstruction is not like Indo-
European reconstruction (yet)"
 Andrew Hsiu (2018), "Linking the Sino-Tibetan fallen leaves"